The Altar Steps eBook

used to jeer openly at his colleague, Mr. Spaull, who
never played football, never did anything in the way
of exercise except wrestle flirtatiously with the
boys, while Mr. Palmer was bellowing up and down the
field of play and charging his pupils with additional
vigour to counteract the feebleness of Mr. Spaull.
Poor Mr. Spaull, he was ordained about three years
after Mark came to Slowbridge, and a week later he
was run over by a brewer’s dray and killed.

CHAPTER X

WHIT-SUNDAY

Mark at the age of fifteen was a bitter, lonely, and
unattractive boy. Three years of Haverton House,
three years of Uncle Henry’s desiccated religion,
three years of Mr. Palmer’s athletic education
and Mr. Spaull’s milksop morality, three years
of wearing clothes that were too small for him, three
years of Haverton House cooking, three years of warts
and bad haircutting, of ink and Aunt Helen’s
confident purging had destroyed that gusto for life
which when Mark first came to Slowbridge used to express
itself in such loud laughter. Uncle Henry probably
supposed that the cure of his nephew’s irritating
laugh was the foundation stone of that successful
career, which it would soon be time to discuss in
detail. The few months between now and Mark’s
sixteenth birthday would soon pass, however dreary
the restrictions of Haverton House, and then it would
be time to go and talk to Mr. Hitchcock about that
articled clerkship toward the fees for which the small
sum left by his mother would contribute. Mark
was so anxious to be finished with Haverton House
that he would have welcomed a prospect even less attractive
than Mr. Hitchcock’s office in Finsbury Square;
it never occurred to him that the money left by his
mother could be spent to greater advantage for himself.
By now it was over L500, and Uncle Henry on Sunday
evenings when he was feeling comfortably replete with
the day’s devotion would sometimes allude to
his having left the interest to accumulate and would
urge Mark to be up and doing in order to show his
gratitude for all that he and Aunt Helen had conferred
upon him. Mark felt no gratitude; in fact at
this period he felt nothing except a kind of surly
listlessness. He was like somebody who through
the carelessness of his nurse or guardian has been
crippled in youth, and who is preparing to enter the
world with a suppressed resentment against everybody
and everything.

“Not still hankering after a lighthouse?”
Uncle Henry asked, and one seemed to hear his words
snapping like dry twigs beneath the heavy tread of
his mind.